Confederate Soldiers and their Motivations

I met him at a reenactment of the Battle of Shiloh. I don't know if he was openly racist, but he sure was a Confederate apologist...but everybody that knew him here knows that. I didn't see any white supremacist shit, but I wasn't looking for it either.

Of course he was racist. You could see it in his writings. He tried to hide it but it was there. Especially when talking about the Civil War.

And you have to be a racist to put on a Confederate uniform. You're literally pretending to fight for the side that thought owning people was a good idea.

I would reconsider enslaving people, you ignorant fuck. The Germans had enough sense to be embarrassed by their shameful past, why can't you?

Shit, even California is built off of the near genocide of natives and you don't see me going around patting myself on the back for that.

Yes enslaving people is not at all evil.

And I guess whether or not it's OK to fight for evil depends on whether or not it's a civil war, for some reason? Not totally clear on the logic here.

You obviously didn't watch the video, the ex-confederate condemned slavery, even though he grew up (literally) with slaves.

You can play the TLDR game all you want Federal Idiot but there was only one states right issue that the South was screaming about and that was slavery.

There is no evidence of any kind that the leaders of the Southern states were concerned with any other issue. So to claim the Civil War was about states rights and not slavery is something racists do to try hide they want to still own people.

Civil wars are very different, it's literally brother against brother, with varying motivations.

You're talking about political motivations of the confederacy vs the motivations of the soldiers in the field.

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Muad'dib disagrees!

No they aren't different.

The American Civil War is unique in that it wasn't a massive bloody affair like most civil wars. However like most civil wars there is one side that is the bad guy and in this case it was the Confederacy.

Wanting to own slaves is evil no matter how you dress it up.

Imagine federal troops invading your state, what are you going to do?

Irrelevant. It doesn't matter what the solider on the field thinks.

I'm sure you can find plenty of Germans who fought for "Germany and not that mustached nut" but guess what? They still fought for the wrong side. They still fought on the side of evil.

Help them put down the rebellion of idiots trying to leave.

That wasn't the motivation for most soldiers. It wasn't the defense of slavery, it was the defense of their land, family and state. It's not a black and white issue.

Again it's irrelevant why the individual soldier fought.

You can find a million different reasons why a individual man picked up a rifle and fought. Even on the Union side. Some fought to end slavery. Some fought to keep the Union together. Some probably fought because they liked fighting. Who the hell knows. It doesn't matter.

But what matters is the reason they were fighting in the first place was because the leaders of the places they resided in decided that slavery was a good thing and needed to keep going.

If it was to end slavery, I'd help them.

Exactly. If federal troops were invading my state and there was reason to hope that their success would mean ending a massive evil that my state was perpetrating, I'd like to think I'd be supporting them.

Oh, and the Germans had American troops invading their country in 1945. That didn't somehow magically make them the good guys.

Again, I'm going to stop owning people. Literally.

But not figuratively. I will figuratively own you any day.

You do know Elwood is from Alabama, right?

He's very much aware of the historical context as well as the bullshit lies the South has been telling itself over the last six generations since the war ended. The same lies and bullshit that otherwise sane people like @Muad Dib defended till his last breath.

He always liked to trot out the photos of black Confederates to say "see? Even blacks fought for us!" But I'd bet my bottom dollar that most of them had no say in the matter, or else most so many of them wouldn't have jumped ship when Union forces rolled into town promising freedom.

So California wanted to secede after Trump won. It would be entirely untruthful to say we would have mentioned a peep about that if Hilary won.

Just like none of those state would have left the union if a more pro-slavery party had fucking won.

Goddamn, this isn't rocket science.

Here you go, FF.

It's No Longer About Southern Heritage. In Fact, It Never Was.

Fucking A, I'm beginning to think Chup had the right goddamn idea to leave here over this racist shit.

Literally every other black poster has left over this garbage, going back to the tongue-in-cheek racist crap that the old Eliteforge let slide with Storm Rucker and that the populace put up with for far too long with Tasvir.

No.

Because you wish it.

Fair play to him choosing a battle where the Confederates lost, though.

If I'm tasked with fighting for slavery? Defect.

here's the thing, my son and I were just talking about this so it's fresh in my mind.

Literally before the ink was dry on the surrender, Southern cultural leadership began the task of propagating the myth of the Glorious Lost Cause. All motivations were noble, all Southern officers were heroic Godly Christian giants who worked for reconciliation and were deliberately gracious to the darkies, and so forth. The details were painted in over a generation, Lincoln the evil invader, Lee the prayerful kindly grandfather, the horrors of reconstruction and the dangers of the negro and so forth.

This mythology was taught to every southern child, in church and in school and at home with the exact same fervor as Christianity for over a hundred years. Time came that textbook companies were driven largely by what Texas wanted and what hadn't been in print before now had their air of legitimacy that comes with a textbook.

Frankly, the spectrum of thought ranging from hard-core racism to Confederate apologia to the worship of the CBF was and is exactly the outcome the creatros of the myth wanted, an indoctrinated and passionate population ready to "rise again" as soon as the opportunity looked promising. Folks like MD and FF never really stop to mull whether or not they are mal-educated pawns who've been lied to all their life, they just assume grandpappy would never have lied about something so important. Of course, grandpappy was lied to in his day too.

QFT.

That should have ended the debate, but of course the retards keep pressing on.

I agreed with this but it was incomplete. Poor and lower class whites in the south knew full well that if slavery was ended, blacks would be free and one can reasonably assume would compete for land and other resources with the poor and lower class whites.

So obviously the poor and lower class whites had a powerful incentive to fight to preserve slavery even though they might well have never owned any of their own.

which state had the highest proportion of blacks as a percentage of their population? IIRC South Carolina. Note which state was the first to secede and the driving force behind secessionist sentiment. South Carolina.

Likewise, which state was the largest cotton grower in the U.S. (and thus had the most economic incentive to hang on to slavery)? Texas.

Which state then sent the most troops aside from Virginia to fight on behalf of the Confederacy even though it wasn't in the path of most of the fighting?

Texas.

No matter how you twist it slavery was the driving force behind secession and thus the Civil War.

People like to point out that "South Carolina nearly seceded during the Nullification Crisis".

Nearly.

But the point is they didn't. South Carolina didn't provoke a war over tariffs.

But they did over slavery.